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40.The lamplights now glimmered through the engirdling trees, conveying a sense of great snugness and comfort inside, and rendering at the same time the unlighted country without strangely solitary and vacant in aspect, considering its nearness to life. The difference between burgh and champaign was increased, too, by sounds which now reached them above others - the notes of a brass band.
T. Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Wessex Edition, Macmillan, London, 1912, p. 31.
PLACE: Dorchester, Dorset
TIME: ca. 1870
The curfew was still rung in Casterbridge, and it was utilized by the inhabitants as a signal for shutting their shops. No sooner did the deep notes of the bell throb between the house-fronts than a clatter of shutters arose through the whole length of the High Street. In a few minutes business at Casterbridge was ended for the day.
T. Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Wessex Edition, Macmillan, London, 1912, p. 32.
PLACE: Dorchester, Dorset
TIME: ca. 1870
Other clocks struck eight from time to time - one gloomily from the gaol, another from the gable of an almshouse, with a preparative creak of machinery more audible than the note of the bell; a row of tall, varnished case-clocks from the interior of a clock-makerts shop joined in one after another just as the shutters were enclosing them, like a row of actors delivering their final speeches before the fall of the curtain; then chimes were heard stammering out the Sicilian Mariners' Hymn; * so that chronologists of the advanced school were appreciably on their way to the next hour before the whole business of the old one was satisfactorily wound up.
*Author's note: These chimes, like those of other country churches, have been silenced for many years.
T. Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Wessex Edition, Macmillan, London, 1912, p. 32.
PLACE: Dorchester, Dorset
TIME: ca. 1870
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